


An Inkling of Infinity

by prologi



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Groundhog Day, M/M, Magical Realism, R is not a happy bunny, Temporary Character Death, rated Teen for the all the violence and death not the shippiness, sort of a happy ending, wanky metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-15
Updated: 2013-04-15
Packaged: 2017-12-08 15:06:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/762778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prologi/pseuds/prologi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grantaire re-lives his final day, over and over and over. Not all things remain constant, however.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Inkling of Infinity

_Oh often have I washed and dressed_  
And what's to show for all my pain?  
Let me lie abed and rest:  
Ten thousand times I've done my best  
And all's to do again. 

\- A.E. Housman, [Yonder See the Morning](http://prologi.tumblr.com/post/45914860505)

***

**0.**

Grantaire wakes up sprawled at the bottom of the barricade with the leg of a hopelessly broken piano digging into his side. Not that it's the least comfortable place he's ever slept, but usually he's a lot less sober. He heaves himself up with a hand on mute keys.

He used to play the piano, in his mis-spent youth. Quite well, too, until he managed to crush all the fingers of his right hand in a fit of drunken idiocy. Jehan would have a field day with the poignancy of this tragedy, which is one of the many reasons he's never shared that anecdote with anyone. But Grantaire is left-handed, and anyway, he still has his senses. He can still drink in every bit of Enjolras he can steal away, and that has always been his greatest art.

The dawn is pale and grey. Everyone looks impossibly tired, more tired than they looked before going to sleep last night. It's probably from a combination of restless snatches of sleep and of the rapid aging that comes with seeing death and real violence for the first time. None of them are soldiers, but they are starting to look like ones.

Enjolras, of course, is still radiantly beautiful, even if some of the customary fire seems to have bled from his eyes. Grantaire can tell, even from his vantage point clear across the little square, almost as far as it is possible to get. Still, the voice of their leader doesn't shake when he tells them of the fate of all the other groups that caught the flame of their rebellion. Theirs is the only barricade still remaining. He's standing part of the way up, the sun doing its best to gild him like it's his birthright to be made of liquid gold.

Grantaire won't watch these children die. He thought he would be here to bear witness, to see Enjolras in the role he was clearly destined to play, but turns out he doesn't belong here either. He retreats into the cafe and drinks himself into unconsciousness.

 

He comes to with a splitting headache, which is nothing out of the usual, and a number of rifles pointed straight at him, which is. He's barely awake enough to register surprise and indignation at being put down like a dog, even if that is only what he deserves.

***

**1.**

Grantaire is surprised to wake up in an uncomfortable huddle next to a ramshackle barricade with a piano leg trying to make friends with his heart through his ribs. It takes him a moment to remember why this is unexpected. He's ready to file the whole getting shot business away as another unpleasant alcohol-fuelled dream, until he sees Enjolras standing across the street, the defeated set of his shoulders anointed by even the meager sunlight.

Somehow, impossibly, it's the day of the final battle again. As far as Grantaire is concerned, he is either going mad or has acquired sudden, useless powers of foresight, and neither of those options have many things to recommend them. He chooses to repeat his earlier actions in the hope death will stick this time.

 

When he rouses from this bout of drinking, it's to a chaos of noise. The sounds of fighting, he realises. He struggles up from the floor - it's sticky with someone else's blood, a truth so awful his mind struggles to even register it - and immediately goes down again from a stray bullet between the eyes.

***

**2.**

He's nothing if not persistent, and he is willing to give third times and their charms a chance.

 

This time he sees one of his friends die right in front of him. It's Joly, coughing up blood after getting a sword to the chest. He looks pained, shocked, and a little offended, like someone just stole all his organs without consulting him.

When the bayonet goes through Grantaire's carotid artery, it's welcomed.

***

**3.**

Maybe he's supposed to stand and fight. That's what second (and third and fourth) chances are supposed to be about, after all, redeeming yourself through taking the high road this time around.

Turns out he's a drinker, not a fighter. The first time, and every time thereafter, he collapses on the ground with some gruesome wound, blood pouring out of his body while his eyes eat up the sight of Enjolras standing tall on the spine of the barricade, backlit and terrible like an angel of the Old Testament school, shouting someone else's name. Sometimes death is swift and sometimes slow, but it always makes his eyes close before he tells them to.

Grantaire never did have much of a head for heights.

***

**9.**

He's taken to crouching in a corner of the Musain with a frankly astonishing about of drink from the moment he wakes up and Enjolras delivers the bad news. Grantaire isn't of use in the fight, and he can't even capture this battle in words or pictures for the benefit of future generations of stupid idealists whose eyes shine so bright looking directly at them hurt. The best Grantaire can hope for is to drown out as much of the massacre as he can, and then wish for a quick death from an anonymous member of the Guard.

He's not sure why the events are unfolding in a different pattern each day. Maybe the laws of Newton and Kepler are wrong, and the universe is not just a complicated clock some unknown Creator wound into action. Maybe there is randomness in the world, or maybe all of this, too, is pre-destined. Grantaire doesn't know, and doesn't care. He has never had enough faith in him to even believe any particular theory to be false.

 

This time, when he rouses in the cafe, his ears are ringing with how quiet everything is. After a moment, though, he can hear a crowd of heavy footsteps on the upper floor. He isn't often a man driven by curiosity, but something in him is guiding his feet around the bodies of the fallen and up the stairs without a conscious order.

What he finds is almost enough to stop his sorry heart cold. The floor is littered with corpses - the back of his mind fuzzily recognises a head of hair, a scarf - but there, standing by the window, is Enjolras, and facing him are a dozen guardsmen with their guns raised.

Enjolras is still proud and magnificent, but Grantaire can tell he's afraid. He's a scholar of the faintest nuances of Enjolras, but this is one of which he has before seen only shadows.

It's like a force outside himself is propelling Grantaire forward, dazedly maneuvering past the soldiers. Enjolras looks surprised, but not altogether unhappy. Maybe he's simply glad to not die alone, no matter how unworthy the company.

"Do you permit it?" Grantaire asks, anyway, because he loves Enjolras too ardently to not ask before taking this final liberty. A brilliant smile begins to dawn on Enjolras's face. Gunshots fill the air.

***

**25.**

Perhaps living past midnight is the trick. Grantaire's is not a scientific mind, but he's had a lot of time to think it over, in between dying with Enjolras again and again and again. He doesn't think it's possible to grow tired of the only worthy thing you have ever done, or of that brief glimpse of Enjolras's smile, but witnessing the death of the only thing worth faith is starting to wear him down. This time he remains in his corner and lets the soldiers assume he's already dead. Pretending doesn't take much imagination anymore.

 

When the killing field finally draws quiet, Grantaire stands up. He might as well see if their defeat was glorious enough to cause the world to change even a little bit.  
The square outside the Musain runs red with blood, bodies in and out of uniform strewn everywhere. At the beginning he'd been unsettled by the sight, but he's had time to shield himself from its effects. What he sees upon turning around to look back at the cafe that has been his haven is still enough to bring him to his knees on the gory cobblestones.

It's Enjolras. He's hanging out the window with a red flag clutched in a resolute fist, even in death. A perfect vision of Liberty leading the people to their deaths.

If living past midnight means Grantaire leaves the time loop and goes on to live in this world, he doesn't want to know. This is not a world in which he could bear to exist for even a minute. The only thing it has to offer him is a pistol with an unused bullet.

***

**39.**

Sometimes he could swear there are fewer and fewer people at the battle.

The gang on the losing side of the barricade seems more quiet and withdrawn, though when he tries to count Grantaire can't tell if the difference comes from the number of people or from their waning spirit. It is taking longer and longer for the Guard to overpower them, however. Maybe that means that there is an end to all this, after all.

 

That would be a blessing, to such an extent that he can nearly bring himself to believe it. Grantaire has always been a lonely soul, too melancholy or brash or drunk or disillusioned or sarcastically romantic to fit into any crowd, and for a large part of his life the only solace he's had is the promise of limits. Every day might be suffering - every heartbeat a punch, every breath like drowning - but they at least had the purpose of slowly bringing him closer to his eventual, no doubt graceless, death. He didn't have the courage or the resolve to make that death happen, himself, but he did what he could to hasten its arrival with drink and questionable life choices.

He has been witness to this battle so many times he has begun to think it will go on forever, and that is the worst fate he can imagine. Grantaire already spends most of his time regretting his past and dreading his future. Knowing that his past would continue to get longer and his future had no end would be the worst kind of torture.

***

**43.**

Grantaire's no longer sure if any of the others are real, or merely reflections of his fractured memories. Everything has taken on a distant, unreal air. Everything except Enjolras, of course. Enjolras seems unreal as well, but it's the same kind of supernatural aura that has always turned his surroundings into an indistinct blur.

He wonders if he's really dead and stuck in the afterlife. Whether this is supposed to be Heaven or Hell, he can't begin to guess.

***

**48.**

This is neither Heaven nor Hell, he realises. This is much more like the justice meted out by Greek deities. Grantaire can't help but wonder if the model for his eternal torture is Sisyphus or Tantalus.

***

**54.**

Once, they win. Well, they live through the day. Not all of them, of course, not by far, but it's enough that Combeferre manages to negotiate a ceasefire long enough for each side to pay respects to their dead and to snatch a few moments of rest. The mood is a strange mixture of jubilant victory and crushing loss. Grantaire stands in the Musain, the bodies of the closest thing he's ever had to friends at his feet - Feuilly, Bahorel, Joly; he hasn't seen Courfeyrac or Jehan all day, and can only expect the worst - and Enjolras vividly, defiantly alive, almost thrumming with it. After a moment of silence he notices, to his surprised horror and mortification, tears running freely down his face and his breath catching on huge, heaving sobs. It's like a pressure valve has suddenly opened.

He can't remember the last time he cried. If there's one thing frequent public intoxication and close proximity to the object of one's intense unrequited adoration is good for, it's learning to control emotional outbursts. Grantaire's not sure if he's sad or happy or shocked or something completely different. He hadn't even known he was capable of emotion he didn't have to fake through a fog of alcohol and exhaustion and just not caring anymore. There had been bitterness and resignation and a measure of despair and frustrated anger, of course, and brief glimpses of rapturous euphoria that quickly turned to ice in his bones whenever Enjolras paid him any manner of attention. But nothing this clean and razor-sharp, like a holy fire burning his sins away. Not that even the almighty fire of Purgatory itself could begin to clear all the filth off his damned soul.

When Enjolras puts a careful hand on his shoulder, like he's something he would miss if it broke, like he's a friend, it feels like his head has breached the surface of a deep, cold lake. The air he manages to drag into his lungs around regurgitating everything that has ever been human in him feels like the first breath he's had in years. It hurts more than any of his numerous deaths.

 

Enjolras steers him upstairs carefully, like he's coaxing a half-wild dog to take a bone from his hand without biting it off. The other survivors are out in the square, somberly drinking whatever they could salvage from the cafe-turned-mausoleum before they lost their nerve. The drinks poured out in the name of lost friends are almost enough to wash some of the blood off the street.

Grantaire allows himself to be lowered into a chair, one of the few that hadn't been thrown out the window to form the barricade. Enjolras remains standing, pacing slowly back and forth across the floor. Grantaire's eyes follow each of his steps as if hypnotised. Enjolras has always had that effect on him, through no fault of his own.

"So," Grantaire says, because he's never been able to keep his fool mouth shut, "We're still alive."

Enjolras nods, not pausing in his walking. He looks just as commanding and fierce as usual, but a keen observer (like Grantaire, of course, he is never not *keen* when it comes to Enjolras) might see the faintest tremor in his hands, a slight overwhelmed quirk to his mouth. "We've triumphed. No matter what happens, we have made the monarchy flinch."

"It doesn't matter," Grantaire says. Twisting knives in hidden wounds is one of his few talents. "They will come back in the morning and slaughter us all like animals, and nothing will change. You will be but a footnote in history books of the future."

The other man (he seems so much older now, less like a boy) whirls around, fixing Grantaire with a stare that burns and weighs on him like a branding iron. "I cannot believe you!"

"What did you expect? I have never believed in your noble cause; why would I start now it's cost most of my friends their lives?"

"You can't believe they died for nothing! The people will see their sacrifice and know it was just!"

"They didn't die for nothing, Apollo; they died for you and for their faith. They might be martyrs, but saints have never toppled empires."

Enjolras shakes his head and slouches against the window frame on the other side of the room, burying his head in his hands. It reminds Grantaire of the times they died side by side in the hands of an execution squad. They were so much closer then.

"I thought we had finally convinced you. I thought that if even you could believe in the cause, there was no one we couldn't convince," Enjolras says, not lifting his head. His golden curls cascade down to cover his face. The setting sun streaming through the window sets his figure alight, so he looks like a marble angel weeping over the grave of a child. That child may be the Republic or the Amis or even his brief faith in Grantaire.

"I believe in you. There is nothing else I have ever trusted to be real," Grantaire replies. He is exhausted by the fighting and the release of emotion and by the weight of Enjolras's disappointment.

With a sigh that sounds like a drowning man finally giving up, Enjolras lifts his gaze and walks across the floor to where Grantaire still sits in the exact same position. His steps echo in the bare room like distant cannons. "Would that you believed in yourself, at least," he says, and gently places his hands on Grantaire's shoulders. Their bodies fit together like a finely crafted piece of joinery.

"There is enough to believe in in you and not much at all in me." He leans forward and rests his forehead against the fabric covering Enjolras's stomach. Something wet, probably blood, sticks to the wild strands of his hair, but that, too, feels like a benediction. "I must thank you for humoring my hysterics," he adds before Enjolras can keep arguing about every person's inherent worth. Grantaire has never believed in equality, because Enjolras is so clearly above him in all respects.

"It's what friends do. I would have done that for anyone," the blond replies. His hands migrate to Grantaire's hair. It's so pleasant he almost starts to purr, and can't suppress the urge to nuzzle further into the other.

"Yes, but we both know I'm really not someone like they are."

"Of course you are. Everyone is a person, worthy of-"

"If you only knew how wrong you are," Grantaire interrupts with a huff. His eyes are closed and there are beautiful hands combing through his hair and Enjolras smells - well, not good, by a long shot, but like himself in a way that is intoxicating in a whole new way. And yet he can't feel happy or content, because what happens next? He will only lose Enjolras to the revolution again, like he seems doomed to do again and again. "I'm tired," he adds, because he can't bear to hear hollow reassurances about his value. He has none, not as a revolutionary and certainly not as a citizen. There is nothing in him Enjolras can use.

After a long, soft silence Enjolras seems to decide he's fallen asleep. Deliberate touches guide him from the chair to the floor, and after a moment footsteps track across the floor and down the stairs.

 

When he can breathe again without his lungs filling with ice, Grantaire stands up and walks to the window. He can easily make out Enjolras's red jacket and blond hair in the sparse crowd milling about on the street below. Grantaire considers yelling something to catch his attention, or going to find liquor, but before he gets the chance to do either a bullet from an enemy marksman hidden on a rooftop nearby takes him out once again.

***

**59.**

As the crowd at the barricade - on either side of it - grows thinner the longer this keeps going but he and, much more importantly, Enjolras keep dying again and again and again, Grantaire realises that the dead Greek he takes after the most can be no one but Prometheus.

***

(he has lost count long since).

For the first time, Grantaire wakes up to complete silence. There are no gunshots, no strategizing, not even weak attempts to kindle a revolutionary fighting song. The morning light is as grey and stretched-thin as every time before, and the damn piano leg is still wedged into his side.

The square is empty. There's no sign of the builders of the barricade, like it had coalesced together through some unknown force in the night. Guns and swords lie here and there, abandoned. Flags hang straight down in the absence of even the slightest wind.

The only source of movement is Enjolras. It draws Grantaire's eye to him even more strongly than usual. He is a brilliant splash of colour in a strangely washed-out scene as he walks the perimeter, apparently inspecting the structural integrity of the barricade and the surrounding buildings. He doesn't seem to notice Grantaire even exists, which is pretty typical of him.

"Inspecting the troops?" he calls out, because that's what he does when Enjolras isn't looking at him. It works, like it usually does. Enjolras's eyes are sparking with his usual anger, but it is tempered with confusion and, perhaps, relief.

"Oh, you're awake. I was starting to think you were gone as well."

"You didn't think I was good enough to be admitted into Heaven body and soul, like the others?"

Enjolras walks over and leans his elbow against the edge of a table caught at shoulder height in the snarl of furniture. It puts Grantaire in an inelegant sprawl at his feet, cast in his shadow, which feels only right. "Don't be dramatic."

"You're one to talk. It's not dramatics, it's a reasonable hypothesis to explain the situation at hand. You are a god and therefore immortal, every other poor fool here is righteous, and I am not good enough for even the hounds of Hell."

Enjolras huffs. "None of us are any more worthy than the others."

"Yet you keep saying how useless to the cause I am," Grantaire points out. The sun is shining behind Enjolras so brightly it hurts his eyes.

"You are only useless when you are very drunk."

"I am always very drunk."

"I know," Enjolras says with a sigh, and settles down to perch on the mute keys of the piano Grantaire is leaning against. "I think I'm going soft. All this waiting."

"I don't even know if there's anything to wait for."

"I know. The others probably aren't going to come back. It wouldn't fit the pattern."

"The Guard isn't coming back either, so in a way this is a victory." Grantaire doesn't really care, but he is always aware of what Enjolras would think.

"It is not much of a victory when nothing is going to change. The status quo persisting is a loss, and I should be furious. But I'm not. I've lost my edge from overuse."

"Worry not, dear leader. I don't think anything could beat you into a ploughshare."

"I'm not a sword, Grantaire."

"I beg to differ," Grantaire replies, feeling the beginnings of a good praise-argument-mockery brewing inside him. "You are sharp and brilliant and cutting. You exist to strike others down."

Enjolras breathes deeply and puts his head in his hands. "Is that how you truly see me?"

Grantaire blinks up at him, confused. This is something unexpected, even more unexpected than the entire premise is to begin with. "Is that not how you present yourself to the world? Your whole existence is an en garde to the current order."

"You may be right," Enjolras says. It's the first time he's ever said it, and this is also the first time Grantaire is glad to not have a drink in his hand, if only so he has nothing but air to choke upon. "But I wish I had made more time to be a man, a friend, not just a weapon."

"If it's any consolation, you are many times the man I am."

 

They sit in contemplative silence until the bells of an unseen, previously silent clock tower strike noon so loudly it seems to echo through the earth itself, and suddenly everything goes black once more.

***

(∞).

Grantaire wakes. He is really getting sick of it, and the fact there is nothing he can do about it is the worst of all. The sky and all the surrounding buildings are wreathed in a pale grey mist, sunlight diffusing through it so much it looks like the light is coming from every direction at once. It seem like the barricade is the only place left in the world.

Enjolras is looming over him. It has happened before, many times, but Grantaire still flinches. Like a rabbit instinctively knows the outline of a circling hawk, Enjolras lurks in the part of him that reacts before thought can interfere.

"About time. I was getting lonely," Enjolras says, and drops to sit in a chair he probably liberated from the now unnecessary barricade.

"It is a cruel twist of fate your hell and my heaven are the same place," Grantaire muses. "Though it is pleasingly economical. But economy probably doesn't matter much to a goddess fickle enough to punish an angel and reward a libertine."

"This isn't my hell." Enjolras had been staring into the blank sky, but turns to frown at Grantaire. "I don't know why you would assume otherwise. I don't even believe we're dead."

"We might as well be, for all the difference it makes." They sit in vaguely companionable silence for a while. Grantaire very carefully does not look at Enjolras when he speaks again. "I am genuinely sorry you're stuck with me. If I could transmute myself into someone else, I would, but I already spent my whole life trying and failed."

"I don't want anyone else, you idiot," Enjolras replies, sounding much more fond than Grantaire thought even possible. The shock of it is enough to make him look. When he does, he's faced with Enjolras smiling softly, so beautiful it feels like his unworthy eyes should burn out of his head for daring to glimpse the divine.

"What do you mean? I'm useless to you."

"No you're not. You're company, aren't you? I would have gone mad without you."

Grantaire snorts. "A dog could keep you company as well as I can. Wouldn't you rather have Combeferre or Marius instead?"

"Not really, no," Enjolras says. He stands up, and Grantaire is certain he's going to leave. Where, he doesn't know, but if there's someone who will find a way it's Enjolras.

To his utter amazement, Enjolras sits back down instead, this time on the ground next to him. "There are a number of ways in which I prefer you to any of the others," Enjolras continues. He's looking straight ahead, but Grantaire is almost certain there's a hint of a blush painting the graceful curve of his profile.

"What on Earth could those be? Surely you have no need for a drinking partner," Grantaire asks. Enjolras huffs in irritation and turns to face him. There is, indeed, something almost embarrassed about his perfect marble countenance.

"Not drinking," Enjolras says, his voice steady despite everything. Before Grantaire can ask what he means, Enjolras reaches over and takes his hand.

 

They sit quietly for a long time. A small flock of birds makes its way across the sky, no more than little black silhouettes against endless featureless grey. They track the flock's progress with their eyes until it vanishes into the mist without a trace. Grantaire sighs and carefully lays his head on Enjolras's shoulder. He has their joined hands clasped in his other one, like he needs to anchor himself, convince himself it's as real as any of it. Enjolras breathes out, deep and steady, and lets his body lean into Grantaire's. They wait for the bells, and for a new dawn.

**Author's Note:**

>  **eta:** Holy shit check out [this amazing piece of art](http://tanssintaivaankannenalla.tumblr.com/post/48551292861) **tanssintaivaankannenalla** made! And then tell Julius how great it is, because he deserves that.
> 
> Thank you for reading! This is the first story I've finished in years and years, but something about this fandom is super inspiring I guess. The title is from the Tom Stoppard audioplay [If You're Glad I'll Be Frank](http://prologi.tumblr.com/post/43663851540/if-youre-glad-ill-be-frank-by-tom-stoppard-bbc), which you should listen to because it's great.
> 
> This is unbetaed, I know nothing about French history, and English is my second language. I apologise for any stiltedness or anachronisms that may arise, but let's face it, I'm already playing pretty fast and loose with the fabric of space-time. (I did do a fair bit of googling and etymology-checking, but I have my limits.)
> 
> Bonus sad ending for the mathematically inclined: infinity is, by definition, greater than any real number, so even though R's experience may get closer and closer to the last iteration (which isn't exactly incandescently happy, lbr), he will never actually get there.


End file.
